About

Charlie Looking at Her Phone is an exploitable image macro series featuring the character Charlie from the animated web series Hazbin Hotel glancing at her phone and then crying. The three-panel format is typically used with text, a picture or a GIF overlaid on the phone’s screen to which she reacts with sadness. A second variant also flips her emotion to happiness.

Origin

The clip used to pull the images for the meme comes from a scene during Hazbin Hotel’s pilot episode, which debuted on October 28th, 2019. Right around the 18-minute mark (seen below), Charlie exits the hotel’s front door and takes out her “Hellphone,” bringing up a screen with her Mom’s contact info and calls her. The call then goes straight to voicemail and Charlie leaves a message describing how she feels lost and hopeless in her endeavor of rehabilitating demons to peacefully reduce overpopulation in her kingdom.

The template was first created by Redditor^[1] Cheerful-Pessimist- on January 28th, 2020, when they uploaded the blank meme to the r/HazbinHotel subreddit under the title, “Got sad, made a template. Use it well.” Shortly after creating the template, this same user then made two memes and posted them to r/depression_memes and r/2meirl4meirl where the first examples can be found, one of which can be seen here.

Spread

Upon designing the template and posting it to the r/HazbinHotel sub, several members began creating their own versions and uploading them to the community. Shortly after Redditor Cheerful-Pessimist-’s initial post^[2], user gtickno2 produced their meme (below) with a wholesome response to the creator’s title and received over 1,200 upvotes.

Numerous variations began popping up on the r/HazbinHotel sub as the format spread in popularity. On January 30th, Redditor SlyGuy_Twenty_One edited a GIF version that displayed “Raid Shadow Legends” on Charlie’s phone and was upvoted nearly 400 times in addition to a gold Reddit award.^[3]

Outside the show’s own subreddit, the format spread to r/MemeTemplatesOfficial^[4] on January 31st when Redditor PrangsterGangster69 requested a blank version of the meme. The post garnered over 7,000 upvotes and 100 comments as users linked different templates in the thread.

The meme continued to pick up traction on Reddit and was eventually posted to r/memes and r/dankmemes with several versions being upvoted tens of thousands of times. Posted by Redditor Oreo_The_Dino on January 31st, an example of the meme (displayed below) received almost 36,000 upvotes and 226 comments.

A variant with the phone’s text describing the inevitable death of Danny Devito was uploaded to r/dankmemes^[5] by Redditor benshapiroisourlord on January 31st was upvoted almost 25,000 times.

Various Examples

Templates

Search Interest

Unavailable.

External References